2. Why E-mail?
In recent years, email has become one of the most prevalent forms of contact for many
Americans. Offering additional accessibility, design capabilities, and low cost in comparison
to traditional media, email has become a lucrative form of communication for a great number
of businesses as well. Flyer Spirit has the opportunity to take advantage of these benefits, as
well as the ability to measure and analyze the success rate of an email campaign, which could
be minimally tracked previously. The ability to personalize a desired message for a target
audience is just another bonus to exploring the possibilities of an email campaign into the
integrated marketing mix. In order to effectively capitalize off of this opportunity, however,
Flyer Spirit needs to decided on a desired message and develop a unified strategy to see it
through.
How to Get Started
Segment current email list
Segmentation of the email list that Flyer Spirit currently uses will allow them to
specifically target to whom they want to direct certain promotions and offers to.
Gather information about subscribers
Routinely gathering information, such as purchasing patterns, will give Flyer Spirit the
ability to send an extremely targeted offer to those on their segmented email lists. For
example, if it is basketball season and alumni will be coming into town, Flyer Spirit can send
out an email the week of the game notifying recipients of certain items that will be on sale.
This tactic would increase the communication of specific offers to the targeted audience.
3. Contact regularly
Subscribers to the campaign should be contacted regularly, but not overly. It is
important to include recipients on campaigns that will appeal to them, but Flyer Spirit must be
sure not to overextend each relationship or they risk losing valuable customers. Finding the
optimal contact rate and message will be the job of Flyer Spirit to analyze, but it is best to air
on the side of conservative regularity while finding that point.
Promotion-centric
Including promotions or special deals with each email campaign will only help their
open, click-through, and action rates. Contacting recipients just to contact them can be
damaging, so having a purpose for the reader to read, such as a promotion, will help all
campaigns be more effective.
Tools
To more easily develop and manage these campaigns, Flyer Spirit should invest in a
subscription to web-based emarketing software. These programs would allow Flyer Spirit to
simply design a professional HTML template, segment lists of contacts, and track and analyze
specific actions taken by recipients upon reception. In addition, future sales could be tracked
through some of these applications. Two of these marketing tools include salesforce.com and
icontact.com, which are popular programs among Fortune 500 and small businesses alike.
To start, iContact.com costs $9.95/user/month for the basic access. This tool will allow
Flyer Spirit to access to more than 300 email templates, original resources on how to establish
a successful e-mail marketing campaign, scheduling, and real-time tracking of open, click thru,
and bounce back rates.
4. A second option is salesforce.com. Salesforce.com costs only $99/user/year for the
Group Edition. Aside from the email marketing tools, templates, scheduling, and analytics,
salesforce.com offers a number of other popular marketing and sales tools. These tools include
Google Analytics, customer profiles, and sales tracking, all of which could be potentially
implemented into many different facets of the Flyer Enterprises conglomerate.
Who is Responsible?
Flyer Spirit will want to designate someone from within that has close integration with
the marketing campaigns, such as the Marketing Manager, to manage the emarketing tool and
email campaigns. By promoting from within the company, Flyer Spirit will be able to ensure
the person understands the current position of the business, and how to create a feasible long-
term strategy of effective implementation. This person will be in charge of the specific tasks
involved with this effort as well. First, all emails being sent out will have a uniform writing
style and appearance. Second, the CMO will be an expert at creating the template/format and
including all necessary information without any clutter. Finally, this is a cost-effective option
because it will save the company the time and money of having to hire and train someone new
that is unfamiliar with Flyer Spirit.
The designated controller would have the responsibilities of managing the recipient list,
designing the campaign emails, and creating specific timelines of when e-mails will be sent
out. In addition, the controller will also be responsible for tracking and analyzing each
campaign, as far who is opening, responding, opting-out, etc.
Timeline
Our group recommends that the following timeline is followed in order to be able to
5. properly manage the email campaign.
• March: Designate Controller
• April: Segment and Promote Subscriber List
• May: Reunion Weekend Campaign
• August: Back to School Campaign
• October: Parent’s Weekend Campaign
• November: Christmas Campaign
• December to March: Basketball Campaign
First noted above is a tentative time table for certain administrative actions to occur. These
activities are crucial to the scheduling, planning, and promotion of each successful campaign.
In addition, this rough timeline gives a tentative schedule that allows Flyer Spirit to properly
organize and plan for sales and promotional events that will be occurring in the store and on
the website. Each of the above events is a situation in which there will be an increased traffic
into thus store, thus leading to an increased sale of merchandise. These events create further
desire to purchase merchandise for each occasion, and are therefore top candidates for
promotional campaigns.
. Developing an email campaign concurrent to the current IMC efforts Flyer Spirit
already pursues will help lead to an increase in sales of merchandise for the company. By
effectively segmenting and targeting their past, current, and potential customers, Flyer Spirit
will see an increase in customer interest, loyalty, and spending without sacrificing desired
profit margins.
